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How East German artists made their country’s experimental art scene a form of (counter) public life. Experimental artists in the final years of the German Democratic Republic did not practice their art in the shadows, on the margins, hiding away from the Stasi’s prying eyes. In fact, as Sara Blaylock shows, many cultivated a critical influence over the very bureaucracies meant to keep them in line, undermining state authority through forthright rather than covert projects. In Parallel Public, Blaylock describes how some East German artists made their country’s experimental art scene a form of (counter) public life, creating an alternative to the crumbling collective underpinnings of th...
Moving through a vast geographical, cultural, and artistic terrain and juxtaposing numerous modernist works, this volume explores the multiplicity of modernism and provides in-depth case studies, including of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the reception of jazz music in Europe, and the Cubist movement in the visual arts.
Comintern Aesthetics shows how the cultural and political networks emerging from the Comintern have continued, even after its demise in 1943.
Introduction : Why Heisig matters -- From the Nazi past to the Cold War present -- Art for an educated nation -- Against the wall : murals, modern art, and controversy -- The contentious emergence of the "Leipzig school"--Portraying workers and revolutionaries -- Conclusion : the quintessential German artist
Documents the rich allusiveness and intellectual probity of experimental filmmaking-a form that thrived despite having been officially banned-in East German socialism's final years
The Body of the People is the first comprehensive study of dance and choreography in East Germany. More than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jens Richard Giersdorf investigates a national dance history in the German Democratic Republic, from its founding as a Communist state that supplanted the Soviet zone of occupation in 1949 through the aftermath of its collapse forty years later, examining complex themes of nationhood, ideology, resistance, and diaspora through an innovative mix of archival research, critical theory, personal narrative, and performance analysis. Giersdorf looks closely at uniquely East German dance forms—including mass exercise events, national folk dan...
Among the surprising events in Eastern Europe in 1989, none astonished the world more than the nonviolent overthrow of the East German Communist regime. This book examines the collapse of East Germany as it unfolded in one city, Leipzig. Analyzing the leading role of the GDR's second largest city, Bartee combines chronological and descriptive narration of events with an in-depth critique of leading actors and groups. Prominent among these are the Protestant churches and the array of opposition groups concerned for peace, freedom, human rights, justice, and the environment. Bartee focuses in particular on the famous peace prayer services in St. Nicholas Church and the protest activities of the groups as they expanded into the mass demonstrations of late 1989. Using surveys and interviews with participants, as well as Leipzig archives, this study examines the motivations and methods of the demonstrators. Bartee concludes that, while the prayer services provided hope, inspiration, and information, the strong desire for a free, open society served as the group's chief motivation.
This book offers a new definition of metaphor-as an ontological and visual construction, whose roots are external visual forms, and its motivation is our attachment to forms. This definition, which Michalle Gal names “visualist,” challenges the ruling conceptualist theory of metaphors and places a new emphasis on how we experience rather than understand metaphors. In doing so, she responds to the visual turn that is taking place in literature and the media, demanding that the visual become a site of philosophical analysis. This focus on the external visual world allows Gal to employ visual theories to capture the essence of metaphor. She looks beyond conceptual or semantic mechanism, and...
This book traces developments in cyberpunk culture through a close engagement with the novels of the ‘godfather of cyberpunk’, William Gibson. Connecting his relational model of ‘gestalt’ psychology and imagery with that of the posthuman networked identities found in cyberpunk, the author draws out relations with key cultural moments of the last 40 years: postmodernism, posthumanism, 9/11, and the Anthropocene. By identifying cyberpunk ways of seeing with cyberpunk ways of being, the author shows how a visual style is crucial to cyberpunk on a philosophical level, as well as on an aesthetic level. Tracing a trajectory over Gibson’s work that brings him from an emphasis on the visua...
The artist Dierk Schmidt (Unna, 1965) makes use of the aesthetic and the visual to disrupt positivist and liner concepts of history with respect to the omissions and violence in colonial narratives -- one of the core themes running through his work, along with a need for the restitution of plundered objects and the related international law -- the manipulation of museum discourses and the contrived and dramatic state of televised politics. 0The retrospective held by the Museo Reina Sofía assembles some of Schmidt?s most ambitious projects as 'The Division of the Earth' or 'Broken Windows' and concludes with a site-specific project related to the role of the Palacio de Velázquez -- where the show is displayed -- directly after it was built in 1883 and in view of its housing, in 1887, part of the monographic exhibition of the Philippines, Mariana and Caroline Islands, before becoming the 'Biblioteca y Museo de Ultramar' (the Museum-Library of the Overseas).00Exhibition: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (09.10.2018-10.03.2019).